Читать книгу Unwrapping The Innocent's Secret / Bound By Their Nine-Month Scandal - Dani Collins - Страница 14

HER WORDS WERE IMPOSSIBLE.

They made no sense, no matter how loudly they echoed in his head.

Pascal thought perhaps he staggered back beneath the weight of all that impossibility, possibly even crumpled to the floor—but of course, he did no such thing. He was frozen into place as surely as if the stones beneath him had made him a statue, staring back at her.

In horror. In confusion.

There must be some mistake, a sliver of rationality deep inside him insisted.

“What did you say?” he managed to ask through a mouth that no longer felt like his own.

Because while he was certain he had heard her perfectly well, no matter how he tried to rearrange those words in his head, they still didn’t make sense. They couldn’t make sense.

“This isn’t something I want to tell you,” Cecilia said, tilting her chin up in a belligerent sort of way that was one more thing that didn’t make sense.

Because the sweet almost-nun he’d known hadn’t had the faintest hint of belligerence in her entire body. Though her body was obviously the last thing in the world he needed to be thinking about just now.

“It’s the right thing to do,” she was saying. “So. Now you know.”

And then, astonishingly, nodded in punctuation. As if the subject was now closed.

“I cannot be understanding you.” His voice sounded as little like his own as the words felt in his mouth, and he still couldn’t seem to move the way he wanted to. Or at all.

Cecilia sighed as if he was testing her patience, another affront to add to the list. “You have a son, Pascal. And you shouldn’t be surprised to hear that. If memory serves, you never spared the slightest thought for any kind of birth control. What did you think would happen?”

It was the sheer insult of that—and the unfairness—that seared through him, hot enough to loosen his paralysis.

“I was recovering from a car accident in a hospital,” he gritted out. “When do you imagine I might have nipped out to the shops and found appropriate protection? I assumed you had taken care of it.”

“Taken care of it?” She actually laughed, which nearly let Pascal’s temper get the better of him. But she didn’t seem to notice. Or care if she did. “I was raised in a convent. With real-life, actual nuns. It might surprise you to learn that the finer details of condom use during premarital sex didn’t come up much during morning prayers.”

Pascal dragged his hands through his hair, though it was cut almost too short to allow it. Unless he was very much mistaken, his hands were actually shaking, something that might have horrified him unto his soul at any other moment. But right now he could hardly do more than note it and move on. It was that or succumb to the high tide swamping him, drowning him, tugging him violently out to sea.

“I cannot have a son,” he snapped out, not caring that his words were far too angry for a place like this. Holy and quiet, with the watchful eyes of too many saints upon him—and none of them as sharp as Cecilia’s gaze. “I cannot.”

Cecilia sniffed. And her remarkable eyes sparked with what he thought was temper, however little that made sense to him.

“And yet you do. But don’t worry. He’s perfect, and he doesn’t need you.” The gleam in her eyes intensified, and he felt it like a blow to the center of his chest. “Feel free to run back to your glossy magazines. Your lingerie models. Whatever makes you happy, Pascal. You can pretend we don’t exist. The way you’ve been doing for six years.”

“How dare you take that tone with me.” His voice was soft, because his fury was so intense he thought it might have singed his vocal cords. The rage and grief in him so hot and blistering he wasn’t sure he’d ever speak in a normal voice again. “You never told me you were pregnant.”

“How would I have done that?” She fired the question at him, plunking her bucket back down on the stone floor with a loud crash. She even took a step toward him as if she wanted this confrontation to get physical. “The first time I saw you mentioned in the papers, two years had gone by. Before that? You’d just disappeared overnight. The army had discharged you, and even if they hadn’t, they weren’t about to hand out a forwarding address. What was I supposed to have done?”

“You knew I was from Rome. You knew—”

If he hadn’t been close enough to see the pulse in her neck go wild, he might have believed the cold smile she aimed at him meant she wasn’t affected by this interaction. But Pascal wasn’t sure that knowledge was helpful.

“Right. So you think I should have…what? Wandered up and down the Spanish Steps while heavily pregnant?” she demanded. “Calling out your name? Or better still, climbed atop the Trevi Fountain with a newborn in my arms, demanding that someone in the crowd take me to you? How do think that would have worked?”

That she had a point only made his anguish worse.

How could this have happened? He couldn’t accept it. He couldn’t believe it. He wanted to tear down this godforsaken church with his hands as if that would change the way she was looking at him. As if it could turn back time.

As if that could save him from the nasty reality that he’d become exactly what he most loathed without knowing it.

“You keep mentioning magazines, which means you clearly saw me in one,” he found himself saying as if he could argue the conviction from her face. As if he could make this her fault and make it better, or different, by shrugging off the blame. “You must have known the company existed. That must mean you could have contacted me. You obviously chose not to do so.”

Her laugh sliced into him. “I called your company repeatedly. Oddly enough, no one took me seriously. Or I assume they didn’t, because it took you all this time to turn up here.”

“Whoever else might have turned you away will be dealt with.” Though even as he said that, he already knew what had likely happened. Any reports of pregnancies would have been dismissed by Guglielmo as opportunists attempting to cash in on Pascal’s success. He would never have dreamed of wasting Pascal’s time with empty claims. “But if you had actually turned up on my doorstep, Cecilia, I would not have denied you entry.”

She actually dared roll her eyes. At him. “That’s good to know. Should you impregnate me and leave me behind like so much trash again, I’ll be sure to take that tack. I’ll gather up whatever children you’ve abandoned, camp out in your lobby and hope for the best. What could possibly go wrong?”

“What kind of person has a man’s child and fails to tell him?” Something cracked wide open inside him, and it was harder and harder to pretend he was angry when it went far deeper than that. When it felt like a catastrophic fissure, deep within. “It has been six years. Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”

“I know exactly what I’ve done, because I’ve been here the whole time, doing it,” she fired back at him, and he had the uneasy notion that she could see that yawning expanse inside him and was aiming straight for it. For him. “You knew where I was. You knew that I was unpardonably naive. You weren’t without experience as you made a point of mentioning more than once. Surely you must have known that anytime people have sex, especially without any protection, there’s the possibility of exactly this occurring. You never inquired.”

“How dare you put this responsibility on me.”

“I will not stand here and listen to lectures from the likes of you on responsibility, thank you,” she bit out. She moved even closer then, and went so far as to jab a finger toward him—very much as if she’d have liked to put out his eye. “You try being a single parent. All the feedings and diaper changes, the crying for no reason and sudden, scary illnesses. Where were you? Not here, handling them.”

“I could hardly handle something I didn’t know was happening.”

She jabbed that finger again, and it occurred to Pascal that she wasn’t the least bit intimidated by him. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d encountered such a thing. And certainly not from a woman he’d thought was a ghost a few hours ago—and who he remembered as nothing but sweet.

“Don’t misunderstand me,” she was saying with more than a little ferocity. “There’s more joy in it than ought to be possible, or the species would have died out. But what I’m talking about is keeping a tiny human alive. What you’re talking about is your own hurt feelings because you chose to disappear into the ether and it turns out, there are consequences for that. One of them is the child you helped make.”

He felt pale with that anguish, mixed liberally with fury. “You dare to speak to me of consequences?”

“I’ve lived your consequences, Pascal,” Cecilia retorted. “An absolutely marvelous little boy has grown into a five-year-old as a consequence of your carelessness. And after trying more than enough times, I didn’t keep banging my head against brick walls trying to find a man who didn’t leave behind so much as a telephone number. I decided that I was going to focus my attention on raising my son, instead. And did.”

“Cecilia—”

“I never expected you to show your face here again,” she told him. “I don’t expect you to stay now. You’re acting as if knowing I was pregnant would have changed something, but I’ll let you in on a secret, Pascal. I know full well it wouldn’t have. Why don’t you spare us both the dramatics and just…go away again?”

Pascal really did stagger then. He had to reach out to keep himself upright, gripping the back of the nearest pew.

As if her certainty that he would abandon his own child no matter the circumstances was almost as grave a betrayal as the fact she’d kept this secret so long.

“I told you,” he said, too many memories flooding his brain then. Of the hours she’d spent at his bedside, talking as well as tending to him. All the things he’d told her in return, because his bed in that clinic had felt disconnected to the world. Why not tell a kind stranger every feeling that had ever moved in him? Why not share every story he had inside him? He’d done that and more. How could she imagine that the man who had done so would turn around and leave now? “I told you how I was raised. What it meant to me to be a bastard son to a cruel, unfeeling man… Have you forgotten?”

Her eyes seemed nearly purple then, with what he only hoped was distress. “I didn’t forget. But people say all kinds of things when they think their lives might end, then turn around and live very differently, when given the chance.”

“I told you,” Pascal growled. “And you decided to do this to me anyway. To my child. When you had to know it was the last thing I would ever have allowed.”

Whatever distress might have been lurking in her, it disappeared in a flush of temper as her chin tipped up again.

“I stopped caring about what you might or might not allow,” she said with a distinct calm that felt like yet another slap when he could barely keep himself together. “Right about the time it became clear to me that you weren’t coming back, and that I was really, truly going to have to have our baby all on my own. And then carry on raising him. I considered adoption, you know. Because my plan was to be a nun, not a mother.” Her tone was bitter then. “Never a mother.”

Something tickled at the back of his mind, about Cecilia’s stories about her own childhood, but he thrust it aside. Because she’d actually wanted to…

“You wanted to give up your child—my child?”

Once again Pascal couldn’t force his mind to process that. He couldn’t seem to breathe past it. It was bad enough that he’d come here on a whim to discover that all this time, the woman who’d haunted him through his life in Rome had kept his child a secret from him. But that he could have come back here today, just like this, and never know? Never have the slightest notion what he’d lost?

That fissure inside him widened. And grew teeth.

“Yes, Pascal,” she said. Because she had teeth, too. And they seemed to sharpen by the second. “It was never my intention to have a child on my own. Why wouldn’t I consider adoption?”

Again Pascal ran a hand over his jaw, his scars. Reminding himself that he had survived the impossible before. Surely he would again.

One way or another.

“I suppose you would like me to thank you for choosing motherhood,” he said, unable to keep the bitterness from his voice. “I find I cannot quite get there. I want to see him.”

He wasn’t looking at her as he said that, and it took him a moment to realize she hadn’t responded. When he slid his gaze back to hers, she had a considering sort of look on her face. As if she was mulling over a decision as she looked at him.

For the first time it occurred to Pascal that she might very well bar him from seeing the child. His child.

How could he be outraged at being denied something he hadn’t known he had when he’d driven into this valley? How could he know himself so little?

“I’ll show you a photograph,” Cecilia replied, her violet eyes glittering with more of that same consideration. “I’m certainly not introducing you to him. He’s five. As far as he’s aware, he doesn’t have a father.”

Pascal blinked, but once more couldn’t really take that in. He felt drunk again, as reckless and out of control as he’d been when he’d driven that car over the side of a mountain. This was like living through that crash again and again. And more, he felt broken into a thousand pieces, the way he had then.

He reminded himself that he was the president and CEO of an international corporation that had made him a billionaire. He laughed off deals that would make other men sweat. He could surely handle one parochial woman and the rest of this…situation.

All he needed to do was stop letting his damned feelings dictate his reactions.

Something he’d thought he’d stamped out years ago. Six years ago, in fact, when he’d received the ultimate wake-up call, had remembered himself and had left.

Cut his own feelings about his father out of this and it was a fairly simple thing. She hadn’t been able to track him down. He hadn’t looked back. It wasn’t even a saga—it was depressingly common.

He cleared his throat. “So you…live here. With him. At the abbey?”

“We have our own cottage,” she said. Grudgingly, he thought.

And Pascal felt better now that he’d allowed a bit of reason back into the mix. More like himself and less like the broken man she’d known.

He looked at the bucket beside her. “If you do not live in the abbey, and you are not a nun or even a novitiate any longer, why on earth are you cleaning this church?”

“I clean,” she said. And when he stared back at her without comprehension, she lifted her pugilistic little chin again. The expression on her face was challenging, which he should probably stop finding so surprising. “That’s what I do. For a living.”

“You…clean. For a living. This is how you support yourself?”

“That’s what I said.”

This time he understood her completely. The words did not bloom into that same dull roar in his head. He felt like himself again, and that allowed him the comfort of the sort of temper he recognized. Not the volcanic, tectonic shift of before—but the sort of laser focus he usually saved for creatures like his father.

Fewer feelings. More fury.

He liked this version of himself much better.

“Are you truly this vindictive?” he asked her, his voice soft with menace and the power he’d fought for—and had no intention of ceding to a fallen nun, thank you. He shifted his position to shove his hands into his pockets and kept his gaze trained on her. “You say you read about me. You knew about the company and claim you called. So there can be no debate about the fact that you know perfectly well that I’m not a poor man. That no matter what else happened, I would never willingly consign my child to be raised in poverty.”

Color bloomed in her cheeks, and he had the sense it was the first honest response he’d seen from her. Maybe that was why he reveled in it, like a thirsty man faced with a mountain spring.

Surely there could be no other reason.

“Your child is not being raised in poverty,” she snapped. “He doesn’t take a private jet to get his shopping done, I grant you, but his life is full. He wants for nothing. And I’m sorry that you think cleaning is beneath you, but luckily, I don’t. I make a good living. I take care of myself and my son. Not everybody needs to be rich.”

“Not everyone can be rich, it is true. But you happen to be raising the son and heir of a man who is. Several times over.”

“Money only buys things, Pascal,” she said with the dismissiveness of someone who had never lived more or less by their wits in the worst parts of a major city. “It certainly doesn’t make a person happy. As anyone who looks at you can tell quite clearly.”

“How would you know?” he asked, his tone deadly.

She flushed again. “I make Dante perfectly happy. That’s what matters.”

“You live in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by nothing but cows and nuns. What kind of life is this for a boy?”

“There was a time when you thought this valley was paradise,” she threw at him. “It hasn’t changed any. But if you have, there is no need for you to suffer the cows and the nuns a moment more. You can turn around and leave right now.”

“I don’t think you’re understanding me.” He sounded almost gentle, he noted, which was at odds with that cold fury inside him. He leaned into it, because it was better than that terrible fissure. “I am Pascal Furlani and we are discussing the sole heir to everything I have built. No son and heir of mine can grow up like this, so far away from everything that matters.”

She scowled. “Then it’s a lucky thing your name isn’t on his birth certificate, isn’t it? You don’t have to worry yourself about how he’s raised.”

Pascal couldn’t seem to do anything but stay frozen solid where he stood, staring at her as if, were he to focus, he could make this go away. He could turn her into the ghost she should have been, not…this. Not mother to another bastard child, but this one his. His.

The scandal when it was discovered—because these things were always discovered, as Pascal knew all too well himself—would brand him the worst kind of hypocrite, given he’d never made any secret of his feelings on his own father’s behavior. He’d made himself the asterisk forever attached to his father’s name. Now he would have his own, and he knew full well the tabloids would have a field day with him.

But the thought of scandal made a different sort of apprehension grip him.

“Did you tell the members of my board about this child?” he demanded.

“I didn’t want to tell you about this child,” she replied furiously, her scowl deepening. “So no, I didn’t share the news with two complete strangers marching around the village officiously, asking rude questions.”

“But that doesn’t mean they couldn’t have seen you. Or have asked someone else. Or otherwise figured it out.”

“I didn’t much care what they did.” And now she sounded impatient, which was just one more insult to add to the pile. “Just so long as they left. Which I would also like you to do. Now.”

Pascal couldn’t let himself think directly about the child. His child. His son. It was too much. It was so heavy he was convinced it would flatten him—but thinking about his spiteful, grasping board members in possession of this secret he hadn’t known he was keeping was different. It was easier to think about what they would do with the information than it was to think about the information itself.

Or that the information was a little boy who didn’t know he had a father who would never, ever have abandoned him if he’d had the choice.

“This is a disaster,” he muttered, more to himself than to her.

But she heard him. Maybe he’d wanted her to hear him.

“Funnily enough, that’s what I thought you would say.” Her scowl smoothed out and her chin went up as if she was wrapping herself in armor. “As a matter of fact, all of this is happening precisely the way I imagined it would. So why don’t we fast-forward to the inevitable end without all of this carrying on that won’t get us anywhere?” Her violet eyes flashed as they held his gaze. “Just go. Leave here and return to your money and your life in Rome. No one has to know that you ever came here. Dante and I will muddle along as we always have and you can spend your time however it is you like. No harm, no foul.”

And she even waved her hand through the air with a languid indifference that made something in Pascal simply…snap.

One moment he was standing frozen and still in his fury, and the next he had moved toward her. He wrapped his hands around her soft, narrow shoulders, then held her there before him.

Cecilia made a slight startled sound. Her hands came up and she braced her fingers against his abdomen, though she didn’t push him away or try to pull back from him. It was as if she was holding her breath, waiting to see what he would do.

But all he did was lower his face so it was directly in hers.

“This is not going to go away,” he promised her, a thundering thing in his voice, though he kept it low. Even. “I am not going to go away. I have a son. A son. You have made me a father and taken it away from me, and I will never forgive you for either one of those things. But I know now. And nothing will be the same. Do you understand me?”

He expected her to order him to let go of her, which he would do, of course, because he wasn’t the animal she seemed to think he was. Even if it wasn’t exactly lost on him that even now, even with what he knew, his body was having a far more enthusiastic reaction to the close proximity with the woman who had haunted him all these years. Her shoulders fit perfectly in his palms, as ever.

And the last time he’d been this close to her, it had been a prelude to his mouth on hers. Then the hardest part of him deep inside her melting, clenching heat, making them both ache. Then shatter. Then do it all over again.

“That,” she said very distinctly, her violet eyes wide and fixed to his, “is absolutely never happening again.”

For the first time since he’d walked into this church, he saw the woman he’d left here six years ago. The one who had always known what he was thinking. The one who had so often been thinking the very same thing.

She certainly was now.

And she had kept this secret from him. She had made him into his worst nightmare. Pascal wanted to crush her. He wanted to cry. He wanted to tear apart this church and rip this whole valley apart with his hands. He wanted to rage hard enough to turn back time, so that he could prevent this tragedy from happening in the first place.

Or, something far more insidious whispered inside him, so you could stay this time. The way you wanted to back then.

And that thought was the biggest betrayal of them all.

Because staying here had never been an option, no matter how much he’d wanted it once. And no matter what price it turned out he’d have to pay for going.

Pascal stopped fighting that roar inside him. He surrendered to the yawning thing, rage and grief, fury and need.

He had never forgotten Cecilia Reginald. He had come back here to exorcise her, but now it seemed he would be twined with her forever in the son they’d made.

It was too much.

It was all too much.

So he hauled her up onto her toes and brought her even closer to him, then crushed his mouth to hers.